It has been a while since I wrote the last column on DotNETForDevices. I also noticed some ‘old’ news on the site and my blog cries for some new entries as well. Usually, I start writing a new column immediately after my vacation, but this time it has been a little different. There are a number of excuses for not writing, all having to do with too much work to be done in too little time. The fall conference season is about to take off. Since I am speaking at a number of conferences and each conference organizer wants slide decks and demo code ahead of the conference in order to publish them on the conference DVD, I had some serious work to do in order to meet the deadlines. Besides that, I have been playing a bit with Visual Studio 2008, beta 2, to prepare for the upcoming Windows Mobility Webcast series around this new version of Visual Studio. You can already sign up for the first part of this series. This is going to be a unique change to meet both Jim Wilson and me on LiveMeeting. Even though we are living approximately 4500 miles from each other, you hopefully don’t notice that during this webcast. Besides these webcast series, I will be involved in a few other webcasts that we are preparing for one of the large US telecom operators. Unexpectedly I also became way too involved in explaining some of the more advanced C# topics like multithreading and .NET Framework performance for some of my coworkers. Last but not least I am busy creating a brand new Windows Mobile training, covering WM 5.0 and WM 6, with focus on native code. And all of this is just extra work, besides my regular job that also takes like 40 hours / week. So even though this column is just a simple excuse why it took so long to write it, I don’t have really more to share with you this week. Well, my schedule looks reasonable from now on. Most of the conference decks and demo’s are done, The Windows Mobile training is slowly but surely getting into shape and the webcasts have not too tight deadlines (yet). So hopefully it is possible to write some new content on a more regular base over the upcoming few months. The weekly column is definitely back, and I will try to blog a few items each week as well. Thanks for coming back to DotNETForDevices.

Maarten Struys